Do all video apps use WebRTC now? Then why does call quality vary so much?

7 points by ohthehugemanate 9y ago ↗ HN

Signal's blog post about video calling caught my attention today. Moxie says they switched to webRTC for the actual streaming part of the call. That's what Hangouts, Mozilla Hello, Whatsapp, and Skype use, too.

So why does it seem like call quality varies so much between services? Is it just different logic for codec/size negotiation? If that's the case, why is (non-webRTC, closed source) Facetime so much more reliable than the rest?

2 comments

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mondainx 9y ago ↗

All the players are doing their own thing, this includes the browsers. Getting everything to play-nice isn't as simple as it was suggested and you're seeing the results of this. Ideally it will settle, but its gonna be a rough year or so. All my opinion of course, but I've been in the WebRTC trenches for over 2 years now.

coralreef 9y ago ↗

I believe Facetime uses proprietary video compression